Authoritarian regimes rely on some degree of repression to maintain power. Yet the modes of repression they deploy vary in important ways, ranging from massive campaigns of civilian killing to restrained but thorough everyday surveillance. Sheena Chestnut Greitens tackles this variation in an impressive and thoughtful book, arguing that the foundational threat perceptions of authoritarian leaders structure how they organize their security apparatuses. These structures create different incentives and organizational processes that raise or lower the amount and scope of violence used by these regimes against internal opponents.

Greitens focuses on coercive institutions that address internal, rather than external, threats, because challenges from within pose the greatest danger to authoritarian rulers. She argues that autocrats face two possible threats: “mass-based” popular revolts versus “elite-based” coups (p. 19). They have to prioritize one of the two and build coercive institutions that are best suited to dealing with that chosen threat. The perceived “dominant threat” (p. 32) at the time of a coercive institution’s founding explains its consequent structure and functioning.

The author focuses on the negative effects of perceived elite threats: In response, autocrats pursue “coup-proofing” strategies that fragment internal security forces and make them socially exclusionary. This fragmentation and exclusion helps to protect autocrats from coups, but also weakens intelligence about society, creates competition and rivalries, and undermines consistent strategy (pp. 53–54). Such apparatuses are more likely to engage in high levels of relatively indiscriminate violence against civilians.

By contrast, autocrats who are primarily focused on mass threats from below will build inclusive and cohesive security institutions aimed at penetrating, monitoring, and controlling society (p. 31). They will be more skilled at securing the regime without high levels of violence. Greitens locates the origins of these institutions in moments of contingent choice, when autocrats building their regimes need to choose which threat is most pressing (pp. 32–36). While change is possible, she argues that it is most likely to degrade inclusive/cohesive institutions into exclusionary/fragmented ones.

Greitens assesses this theory using detailed empirical research from South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. She seeks to measure the scope, intensity, and discrimination of state violence (p. 65) across the cases and over time within them. The research design is appropriate to the question at hand, and she provides substantial evidence on the origins, evolution, and functioning of autocrats’ security apparatuses.

The author shows how Ferdinand Marcos encouraged rivalry and competition within his security apparatus in the Philippines, leading to poorly coordinated and often inefficient violence. While more discussion of the large-scale counterinsurgency operations in Mindanao and against the New People’s Army, as well as their implications for her argument, would have been valuable, Greitens is persuasive in showing that Marcos’s fear of rival elites and fostering of competition and rivalry within his own regime undermined the stability and coherence of regime repression.

As for Taiwan, Greitens identifies a change over time, with reforms in the early 1950s moving from elite- to mass-focused organization and a corresponding shift in the nature of violence. This case shows how potentially malleable perceptions and institutions can be—the “profound rethinking” (p. 86) of the regime’s position in the late 1940s was the trigger for a major shift—but how in this instance it required a contingent blend of causal factors. The Taiwan case is based on deep historical research, including a careful reconstruction of the organization of the Kuomintang Party’s security apparatus.

The most complex case is South Korea under Park Chung Hee and Chun Do Hwan. The South Korean military was highly cohesive (p. 145), but internal security forces differed according to the dominant perceived threats being faced by autocrats, including interesting “mixed” blends of exclusivity and inclusivity in some periods (p. 143). The case gets much more complicated than the theoretical argument, but Greitens handles this complexity well, and shows how even her basic framework can still illuminate subnational variation and the overlap of different levels of aggregation (for instance, pp. 169–71).

This is an impressive book that forces scholars to think much more carefully about the uses and varieties of authoritarian repression: While patronage, legislatures, and coalitions are obviously important, there is also a coldly lethal core to autocratic rule. There are, however, areas in which the author’s argument is less persuasive.

First, the hard choice between mass- and elite-based threats is not fully compelling. Greitens argues that security apparatuses can have only one of two “mutually exclusive institutional designs” (p. 32), privileging one threat over the other. This is asserted more than it is proven. Regimes have a variety of ways of finessing or sidestepping this dilemma. Above all, many governments (both democratic and authoritarian) construct dedicated internal security forces that can handle mass threats while also building either a professional or politically controlled military that can handle external threats while also acting as a check on the coup potential of internal security forces. Interior ministries are different from defense ministries; police are different from armies. This institutional complexity need not introduce debilitating rivalries, but instead might act as a reasonable form of specialization in tasks.

Second, the fusing together of inclusion and cohesiveness (and of exclusion and fragmentation) is problematic. Greitens scopes out separatist conflicts, for instance, but these are major preoccupations of many authoritarian regimes that can break apart the simple dichotomy at the heart of the theory. Exclusionary but cohesive security apparatuses are quite common in such contexts: Burma/Myanmar and Pakistan, for instance, have both had ruling militaries that are simultaneously socially exclusionary (dominated by particular ethnic groups) and highly unified, while being deployed at times against both separatists on the periphery and dissidents in the political core. Minority-rule regimes in Rwanda, Iraq, Syria, and Bahrain have also had this characteristic.

Third, change over time seems a bit easier and more fluid than Greitens’ theoretical framework suggests: Although she argues that change should be in the direction of mass-focused to elite-focused organization (p. 62), both in Taiwan and in South Korea there are shifts in the opposite direction.

Finally, it is not always apparent what state violence is doing in Greitens’s account. The bulk of the theory frames violence as arising from coup-proofing-oriented apparatuses that fall back on violence as a suboptimal outcome resulting from organizational dysfunction. Yet the author notes in the conclusion that this approach does not account for revolutionary communist cases like China and North Korea (pp. 301–3). These are certainly not the only cases in which ambitious regimes pursued violence intentionally as a tool of transformation and terror; contemporary Syria comes to mind as a dramatic example of the intentional, deliberate use of extremely high levels of violence by a regime fixated on threats of mass unrest from below. In many such cases, substantial violence is a feature, not a bug, of regime behavior, and treating it as an aberrant by-product of organizational incentives sidesteps the ideological and political goals of autocratic (and democratic) leaders.

These concerns aside, Greitens has offered a substantial contribution to our understanding of how autocrats seek to maintain their power in the face of prospective threats both from below and from within the elite. Dictators and their Secret Police deserves wide readership and discussion.